The Raging Goblin Builds #9: “Bulldog” Steam Tank and Gunmaster

Some days I have no idea how my brain works, and I seem to have this tendency to come up with things that have no business being put together, yet still work somehow. After all, that’s how we got the Cogstrider. With our idiot governor finally lifting our enforced lockdown after two months, it’s nice to be outside again and go where I want, but I’ve had plenty of time to cook up more crazy ideas and kitbashes for the tabletop. This particular beastie came about after reading the new rules for the Cities of Sigmar in the Age of Sigmar battletome that gives a home to all of the wandering dwarves and empire citizens in the mortal realms. The steam tank, a mainstay of old-school Empire armies, has gotten a revamp in a big way, in that you can now field entire armies of these smoke-belching battering rams on wheels, and in the fluff, they’ve finally figured out how to mass-produce them. (Though why they still look straight out of the Renaissance, I’ll never know.) This got me to thinking about giving my own steampunk troops a steam tank, but with a different flavor than the Railless Interceptor. While the Interceptor remains one of my all-time favorite models, I wondered about making something that is less of an armored gun platform and more akin to a front-line battle tank, able to plow its way through razor wire and trenches to reach the front lines. Using the new steam tank rules as inspiration and bodging them together with another famous tank from the grimdark future that fits the WW1 aesthetic I’m going for, I can present to you the “Bulldog” class Steam Tank, also known as the “Steamin’ Russ.” (Ha ha)

In the fluff of the Shattered World and Last Legion, these things have been in service longer than any other armored fighting vehicle in the Legion arsenal – their ancestors were built centuries ago during the Green War and looked very much like the classic Empire steam tank, being a steam-driven cannon on wheels with an armored ram on front for slugging it out with orcs and goblins. As years went on, the steam tank evolved a bigger and boxier shape, exchanging its wheels for tracks, adding a pair of sponson guns to increase its threat potential, and eschewing all of the decorations and heraldry for more armor plating. Some of the old design cues still remain, like the wheels on the steering tail and the ironbark boiler with fluted smokestack, but overall the machine is mostly designed for frontline combat. The “Bulldog” is the most common variant, and boasts a breach-loading steam cannon as its primary armament, with a turret-mounted steam gun on the top and two sponson-mounted steam guns on the sides. The tank’s weapons systems are all powered by pressure from its boiler, meaning the crew never has to worry about running out of bullets as long as the pressure stays up, though the main gun does require solid ammunition. The tank holds a crew of six: a commander (oversees the crew and operates the turret), driver, gunner, engineer (loads the steam cannon and maintains the engines), and two sponson gunners. Serving on a Bulldog is seen as a suicide mission by Legion tankers, as being forced into a metal box and surrounded by high-pressure steam pipes while you’re being shot at isn’t exactly an ideal mission; not to mention the horror stories of what happens when a crew pushes their tank too far and suffers a “blowout.” However, for those tankers brave or crazy enough to crew one of these monsters, they inspire a great deal of admiration in their comrades as they go barreling across No Man’s Land in a cloud of smoke.

As for what it can do, a Bulldog is basically a steam tank with two extra guns bolted onto it:

I don’t really know how I’ll use it in Warmachine, but it would be fun to have something like this in my army. Besides, Ledfoot and Tredz already have their own smaller version, so it’s not too much of a stretch.

I also had enough parts left over for a bonus model. Using the base body of the steam tank commander with the shoulder pads off the Cadian tank commander and a spare claw from my Onager Dunecrawler (It was supposed to be a telescope. Curse you, shag carpeting!!!), I bodged together this guy:

I could always use him as a Gunmaster in a Cities of Sigmar army, but I prefer the rules Ricki Smith came up with for the Master of Shot:

Unfortunately I have no plans to use him in Warmachine, so this guy will mostly be relegated to AoS. He could make a nice objective marker, though. I’ll have to see if I can come up with any rules for him.

When next we meet for The Raging Goblin Builds…it’s been three years in the making, spent developing the rules, hunting down all the right bits, refining the design, and building, but it’s finally time…the Armored Elite are coming…

See you in the next post!

-The Raging Goblin